LIFE'S A PEARL

I enjoy keeping nonfiction on regular rotation in my reading life.

My big picture focus is almost always on living a good life so my nonfiction book choices often relate in that they contain a lesson to improve or better my life.

My areas of interest usually have to do with self help or personal development whether that’s positive psychology books, parenting guides, or deep dives into the latest nutrition findings.

In my current reading life, I find it works to focus on one nonfiction book a month.

I try to take a slow and steady approach reading a chapter a day to really absorb the information. Often times that means it takes me 10 days to 2 weeks to finish the book. Sometimes longer.

To expand on this trend in my reading life, this year I started a nonfiction book club over on Fable called Pearls of Wisdom. It’s a book club for anyone who wants to learn, reflect, and grow together through nonfiction reading.

What is Fable?

Fable is a free app that makes it easy to read with others at your own pace. It breaks a book down by chapters within the online book club.

While it doesn’t matter as much with nonfiction this breakdown allows readers to avoid spoilers. You don’t open a chapter until you’re done reading it. After completing a chapter you can see what other readers thought. Then you can reply to their comments or add your own notes, reactions, and meaningful quotes to the chat.

I always have my current book club selections posted on the blog’s homepage if you’re interested in reading together!

Why a Nonfiction Review Section?

While I enjoy my fable book clubs, I missed the process of sharing an in-depth review of my nonfiction read on the blog.

I used to do a nonfiction spotlight series for my year of health experiment way back in 2021 when I was pregnant with Mr. O.

Writing out my thoughts, feelings, and takeaways from the book helps me work through them. It also solidifies them in my mind to take forward with me. So I’m bringing this series back to the blog.

I also find I’m more comfortable being a bit more vulnerable in this space. That vulnerability is where nuggets of wisdom from the reading life can transfer over to actual life.

November’s Nonfiction Read

In November we read Life in Five Senses: How Exploring the Senses Got Me Out of My Head and Into the World by Gretchen Rubin.

This book is part memoir, part basic science, and part self help. It’s broken down into five main sections, each one covering one of the five senses.

In this book Rubin gives a brief background on each of the five senses. She then shares her experience with personal experiments she made up for herself to try to further embrace each sense.

Gretchen Rubin is one of my favorite positive psychology authors! I’ve read most of her books – it all started with The Happiness Project for me. I identify as a questioner thanks to her four tendencies framework.

As someone who admires Rubin’s past works and is always looking for ways to be more present and in the moment, I was excited to get into this one. I also thought going into the holiday season would be a great time to learn more about embracing my senses.

Life in Five Senses: How Exploring the Senses Got Me Out of My Head and Into the World by Gretchen Rubin

Book Blurb:

“For more than a decade, Gretchen Rubin had been studying happiness and human nature. Then, one day, a visit to her eye doctor made her realize that she’d been overlooking a key element of happiness: her five senses. She’d spent so much time stuck in her head that she’d allowed the vital sensations of life to slip away, unnoticed. This epiphany lifted her from a state of foggy preoccupation into a world rediscovered by seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, and touching.

In this journey of self-experimentation, Rubin explores the mysteries and joys of the five senses as a path to a happier, more mindful life. Drawing on cutting-edge science, philosophy, literature, and her own efforts to practice what she learns, she investigates the profound power of tuning in to the physical world.

From the simple pleasures of appreciating the magic of ketchup and adding favorite songs to a playlist, to more adventurous efforts like creating a daily ritual of visiting the Metropolitan Museum of Art and attending Flavor University, Rubin show us how to experience each day with depth, delight, and connection. In the rush of daily life, she finds, our five senses offer us an immediate, sustainable way to cheer up, calm down, and engage the world around us—as well as a way to glimpse the soul and touch the transcendent.

Life in Five Senses is an absorbing, layered story of discovery filled with profound insights and practical suggestions about how to heighten our senses and use our powers of perception to live fuller, richer lives—and, ultimately, how to move through the world with more vitality and love.”

Gems from the Introduction

I want to share a few quotes I loved from the introduction. These may give you an idea of whether this book is for you.

The following line is so true and I love the reminder to appreciate what your body is capable of now in the present.

“I kept thinking, ‘This experience is now, it’s here; and it’s also past, never to be repeated.’ In that time, I woke to a profound truth: I had my one body and its capacities right now, and I wouldn’t have them forever.”

This emphasis on the importance of knowing yourself is why I love Rubin’s work.

“One of my most important realizations was that we can build a happy life only on the foundation of self-knowledge. The more my life reflected my own temperament, values, and interests, the happier I became, so I spent a lot of time trying to know myself better.”

I feel like I view my body this way so often too.

“I needed to connect with my five senses. I’d been treating my body like the car my brain was driving around town, but my body wasn’t some vehicle of my soul, to be overlooked when it wasn’t breaking down. My body—through my senses—was my essential connection to the world and to other people.”

Truth! There was a lot in this introduction that I found relatable.

“I wasn’t messy. My faults fell in the opposite direction. I was rigid. I could become so preoccupied with my plans and lists that I forgot to pay attention to what was actually happening around me.”

This is a powerful idea. I love this realization.

“My senses held the power to tie me to the people and moments that I wanted to experience and to remember.”

Review of Life in Five Senses

I gave this book 4 stars.

I tandem read, listening to the audio as I read along with the ebook. This combination approach can help me read even when I’m having a difficult time focusing. It was also fun because Rubin narrates the audiobook herself and I’m very familiar with her voice from listening to her Happier podcast years ago.

However I did not love the way this book was broken down in format. This strictly relates to the fable book club experience. Having 55+ sections to keep track of with only title names not numbers was complicated!

Rubin’s basic information on the 5 senses was interesting and to be honest I needed the science refresher.

There were a lot of fun ideas for embracing each one – invaluable if you’d like to create your own experiment. I’ll share some that stood out to me below. There’s an entire section at the end called Try This at Home: A Five-Senses Jump-Start with countless ideas for experiencing each sense.

Rubin also shared ideas for a five senses journal, a self-portrait, and portraits of loved ones. All of which are inspiring exercises.

I always appreciate that Rubin includes a large Suggestions for Further Reading section.

Still as a fan of Rubin’s previous works, I didn’t love this book as much as I hoped to.

Much of it felt very surface level like she was holding the reader at arm’s length. It was very different from how I remember past books sharing positive personal revelations. When she did occasionally open up her philosophical pondering and tie in quotes went over my head.

There was a sense of melancholy throughout the whole book that I wasn’t really expecting and didn’t necessarily appreciate. I missed the lighter positive tone of her other writings. 

Pearls of Wisdom Takeaways

1. The idea of having foreground and background senses was very interesting to me. I think taste is the sense I engage with the least. Luckily my foodie husband reminds me to embrace it more. I was really excited about many of her taste activity ideas. I also struggled with that section the most because so much of her information conflicted with my own nutrition research.
2. The next time I go to a gallery or art museum, I want to sign up for a tour. That’s probably my favorite way to take in experiences like this. They can be fun and informative adding so much to the experience if you aren’t an art or history buff.
3. All of the inspiration and talk about color made me want to do a photo project again.
4. Her at home silence retreat sounded heavenly to me. That section included great reminders of the beauty of silence and also how powerful the experience of live music is.
5. I had never heard about the different colors of noise before. I gravitate toward pink and green. How about you?

“White encompassed all audible frequencies and reminded me of TV static; pink was a mix of frequencies, with reduced higher frequencies, with a sound closer to ocean waves or falling rain; brown sounded lower, with the hint of a rumble, like a strong wind; blue was higher, with a hissing quality, like water spraying from a hose; green supposedly captured the background sound of nature; black noise was…silence.”

6. Rubin shared her new listening manifesto that she created while focusing on hearing. I loved it and a few times have thought “When in doubt, stop talking” or “Don’t rush to fill a silence”. It’s amazing what the other person may then say.
7. While it was hard for me to relate to her daily visit to the Met, I really enjoyed other people’s daily visit examples especially ones that involved walks in nature. I can see the value of this and while Mr. O and I vary our route for our daily walks, it is fun to notice things daily in our neighborhood.
8. Smell is a very important sense to me. I smell my son, my husband, and even my dog often – I don’t care if people think I’m weird! Different scents can instantly flash me back to a memory but they are also so fleeting and impossible to capture or save. I still have an article of my grandma’s clothing that smells like her though it will probably fade soon.
9. Her experiments like dining in the dark or showering in the dark where she canceled out one sense (usually sight) to heighten others were interesting.
10. I loved the part about Be Gretchen and it made me wonder again what my 12 personal commandments would be. This would probably a worthwhile exercise to do. On that note it would be interesting to reread The Happiness Project to see if it’s still as powerful as I remember. I remember it being life changing, full of data and deeply thoughtful personal examples of introspection. How I felt about this book makes me wonder if that one would hit differently now.

Random Yet Amazing Facts About the Senses

Sight

“We see beauty or ugliness, we feel comforted or unsettled, we feel warmer or colder, as soon as we see color.”

Hearing

“We recognize hundreds of voices, and with people we know well, we recognize their voices after just a few words and can hear whether they’re in a good or bad mood or in good or bad health.”

Smell

“Claims that ‘citrus is cheering’ and ‘peppermint is energizing’ are based purely on learned associations. Americans find the smell of lavender ‘relaxing,’ but people from Brazil consider it ‘invigorating.’”

Taste

“In general, if we haven’t had a positive eating experience with a food by age twenty-five, we probably won’t embrace it.”

Touch

“Because being touched by another person releases natural painkillers in the brain, touch practices like massage have long been associated with health, comfort, and pain relief.”

12 Ideas I’d Like to Try Sparked by this Book 

1. Give yourself a challenge of things (like faces) or certain colors to look for and notice on a walk.
2. Create an “audio apothecary”. Create a playlist that helps you cultivate a certain feeling or mood. I like the idea of feel good music to lift my mood and spirit.
3. Go online to compare different colors of noise. See which you prefer or if your preferences vary depending on mood.
4. Create times of restorative silence.
5. Make voice recordings of the people you love. I do save voicemail messages for this reason but there’s probably a more meaningful record that can be made.
6. Try a board game like Follow Your Nose.
7. Go out of your way to have interesting smell experiences. We’re big on candles in our house and it’s really fun to see how into smelling each one Mr. O is. He takes after his mama.
8. Try to describe your smelling experience with scent words. I love the idea of taking a scent class.
9. Cook with spices you haven’t used before.
10. Hold a taste party. This is where you have a group over and compare varieties of familiar foods. I think different cheeses would be fun! I also love her idea of comparing different varieties of apple – those subtle flavor differences would be hard for me to notice without the side by side comparison.
11. Touch things (when appropriate) whenever curiosity strikes. I want to encourage my son to do the same. Let go of the look but don’t touch rule (within reason).
12. Consider which textures I enjoy and which bother me.

December’s Nonfiction Read

In December we’re reading Mindset: The New Psychology of Success by Carol S. Dweck, PhD.

This book has been on my TBR for years! It’s popped up a lot over this last year, highlighted as a resource in many of our nonfiction book club reads. 

December feels like a great time to finally check this book out. Hopefully we can learn all about cultivating a growth mindset before we get into a new year!  

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Do you embrace all of your senses equally? If not which are your foreground senses and background senses? Do you have any ideas for experiences to embrace each sense more? If you’ve read Life in Five Senses, I’d love to hear some of your thoughts and takeaways!